Digital lighting technologies such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) offer significant advantages over incandescent and fluorescent lamps. These advantages include, but are not limited to, better lighting quality, longer operating life, and lower energy consumption. LEDs also are being designed to have more desirable color temperatures than traditional lamps.
A number of design challenges and costs are associated with replacing traditional lamps with LED illumination devices. These design challenges include thermal management, installation ease, and manufacturing cost control.
Thermal management describes a system's ability to draw heat away from an LED. Lighting technology that employs LEDs suffers shortened lamp and fixture life and decreased performance when operating in high-heat environments. Moreover, when operating in a space-limited enclosure, such as a can light fixture, for example, the heat generated by an LED and its attending circuitry itself can cause damage to the LED. Passive cooling technology, such as a heat sink thermally coupled to a digital device, may be used to transfer heat from a solid material to a fluid medium such as, for example, air. One of the challenges in using a heat sink, however, is that of absorbing and dissipating heat at a sufficient rate with respect to the amount of heat being generated by the LED. If the heat sink does not have the optimal amount of capacity, the heat can gradually build up behind the LED and cause damage to the components.
Compared to incandescent and fluorescent lamps, LED-based lighting solutions have relatively high manufacturing and component costs. These costs are often compounded by a need to replace or reconfigure a light fixture that is designed to support incandescent or fluorescent lamps to instead support LEDs. Consequently, the cost of adoption of digital lighting technology, particularly in the consumer household market, is driven by design choices for retrofit LED-based lamps that impact both cost of manufacture and ease of installation.
Much of the heat generated by LEDs comes out the back of the lamp itself. Consequently, many lamp designs feature heat sinks with fins extending toward the back of a lamp. However, these designs suffer from unfavorable heat dissipation characteristics when used in a space-limited environment such as a can light fixture.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an LED-based lighting system that is not cost prohibitive to manufacture that effectively manages heat without a heat sink.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.